Popular Articles

Adequate Ventilation: How Is It Defined And Does It Adequately Warn Consumers?, Christopher Blankenship

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The purpose of this research was to clarify and define the term “adequate ventilation.” Upon looking at regulations, court cases, and other elements, it is clear that the term is inadequate to inform consumers and does not instruct consumers on how to achieve proper ventilation. To find out if consumers understand this, random persons were asked to define it. The answers were given a numerical value to show the knowledge trend. The outcome showed that most people do not understand how to achieve proper ventilation. Conclusion: Diagrams showing how to set up a room with ventilation and new instructions are ...

Master's Theses and Project Reports

The CubeSat community has begun to develop and implement propulsion systems. This movement represents a new capability which may satisfy mission needs such as orbital and constellation maintenance, formation flight, de-orbit, and even interplanetary travel. With the freedom and capability granted by propulsion systems, CubeSat providers must accept new responsibilities in proportion to the potential hazards that propulsion systems may present.

The Cal Poly CubeSat program publishes and maintains the CubeSat Design Specification (CDS). They wish to help the CubeSat community to safety and responsibly expand its capabilities to include propulsive designs. For this reason, the author embarked on the ...

Public Perception Of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Alice Tam

Aviation Technology Graduate Student Publications

This study explored public risk perception of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) for civilian commercial operations, including cargo and passenger transportation. Civilian operators are considering the use of UAVs to increase safety while reducing labor costs, but negative perceptions may delay the advancement of these aircraft. To document perception of UAV or UAS aircraft for commercial operations, a questionnaire was distributed to adults (ages 18+) who use commercial air travel. The survey classified age group, gender, and UAV familiarity as demographic variables. This study assessed risk perception of UAVs and its correlation to the variables through statistical analysis to identify whether ...

Applying Probabilistic Methods To The Nato Military Load Classification System For Bridges, Andrew J. Macdonald

University of Western Ontario - Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Military vehicles frequently use civilian bridges. The loading effects of military vehicles, both wheeled and tracked, are specific and different than those of civilian vehicles in normal traffic. Calibration to determine appropriate load factors for military loading of civilian bridges has not been fully performed and the corresponding levels of safety have not been quantified. This lack of calibration prevents the implementation of limit state design methods for military bridges and the evaluation bridges for military loading. This thesis quantifies probabilistically the single lane traffic load effects on interior girders of simply supported slab-on-girder bridges for three military vehicles in ...

Traffic Risk In The Australian Toll Road Sector, John Black

Public Infrastructure Bulletin

The article seeks to provide an answer to question about the role of the state in infrastructure planning and delivery and why have Australian state governments been keen to embrace the PPP model of procurement for roads, bridges and tunnels. A contemporary issue is the accuracy of the traffic forecasts on toll roads procured by governments with the PPP model. The “traffic forecasters” in Australia are identified and the broad order of magnitude are the accuracies of their forecasts on projected traffic for toll facilities compared with the actual opening traffic are analysed. Performance is poor (on average, traffic is ...

University of Western Ontario - Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Software development can be considered to be the most uncertain project when compared to other types of projects due to the uncertainty in the customer requirements, the complexity of the process, and the intangible nature of the product. In order to increase the likelihood of success in managing a software project, the project manager(s) must invest more time and effort in the project planning phase. The two main activities in project planning phase are effort estimation and risk management which has to be executed together because the accuracy of the effort estimation is highly dependent on the size and ...

Theses and Dissertations--Mining Engineering

This thesis recounts the experimental study of the dynamic response of polycarbonate blast resistant glazing systems to explosive loading through the use of triaxial load cells, pressure sensors, and a laser displacement gauge. This instrumentation captured the response of the glazing systems to blast loading over three phases of testing. The first phase of testing characterizes the load distribution around the perimeter and the second phase examines the repeatability of the results. The final phase of testing pushes the samples to failure. The results are then compared to HazL, a commonly used blast resistant glazing system analysis software tool. The ...

Articles

This paper deals with the topic of risk management in Public–Private Partnership (PPP). The analysis of the related literature reveals that risks must be analyzed and managed on a context-speciﬁc approach, and that there is a lack of a comprehensive study on the appropriate risk mitigation strategies for each risk embedded in PPP projects. Focusing on the transport sector, based on the results of a Delphi survey, the paper provides guidelines for both public and private parties in deﬁning a list of signiﬁcant risks in PPP motorway projects, and identifying for them both the effective allocation and the suitable ...

Articles

Purpose – This paper aims at providing an overview about literature on tendering process in PPP, with particular regard to transportation PPP case.

Design/methodology/approach – The approach is based on the analysis of the pertinent publications on the theme.

Findings – Three main interest areas can be found in the literature: tendering procedures, evaluation methods and evaluation criteria. Social implications – Contract authorities have several tools in order to pre-qualify and select bidders and negotiate with them: they can choose the instruments which best fit to their market

Originality/value – The paper provides a complete overview on PPP tendering procedures both used ...

Cooperative Construction In Schools In California, John Mauck Donley

Master's Theses and Project Reports

Cooperative Construction in Schools in California

John M. Donley

The construction industry has lost efficiency since 1964, while becoming increasingly more litigious. Schools in California can ill afford the time to allow the construction industry time to fully evolve. It may take years or decades to fully improve the efficiency of, and reduce the conflict within the construction industry.

At the same time, the construction industry has developed new processes to improve efficiency and reduce conflict. These processes are beginning to be broadly embraced by the industry. They all contain cooperative elements. Taken together they represent a new organizing principle ...

Mohammadsadegh Mobin

This research utilizes TOPSIS (a Multi-Criteria ranking methodology) to populate the axes of a risk matrix when modeling risk exposure onboard commercial fishing vessels with the intent to identify mitigating interventions in low risk settings for possible transfer to high risk settings. The specific hazard of interest is the release of refrigerants into confined spaces onboard commercial fishing vessels. The metrics of risk are: 1) expectation that refrigerants are released onboard vessels, and 2) consequence of releases that have occurred. To model expectation: data were collected on the United States’ commercial fisheries, including location and number of participating vessels. These ...

An Assessment Of The Performances Of Several Univariate Tests Of Normality, James Olusegun Adefisoye

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The importance of checking the normality assumption in most statistical procedures especially parametric tests cannot be over emphasized as the validity of the inferences drawn from such procedures usually depend on the validity of this assumption. Numerous methods have been proposed by different authors over the years, some popular and frequently used, others, not so much. This study addresses the performance of eighteen of the available tests for different sample sizes, significance levels, and for a number of symmetric and asymmetric distributions by conducting a Monte-Carlo simulation. The results showed that considerable power is not achieved for symmetric distributions when ...

Articles

This paper deals with the topic of risk management in Public–Private Partnership (PPP). The analysis of the related literature reveals that risks must be analyzed and managed on a context-speciﬁc approach, and that there is a lack of a comprehensive study on the appropriate risk mitigation strategies for each risk embedded in PPP projects. Focusing on the transport sector, based on the results of a Delphi survey, the paper provides guidelines for both public and private parties in deﬁning a list of signiﬁcant risks in PPP motorway projects, and identifying for them both the effective allocation and the suitable ...

Aviation / Aeronautics / Aerospace International Research Conference

This research leverages the objective accident data record towards an individual and societal 3rd party “external” airport risk model for aircraft operations that crash while operating at non-towered airports.

Small aircraft, specifically Part 91, operating at non-towered airports have a crash rate estimated at 10-fold that of commercial operations. Given the nature of the typically non-towered airport, situated in close physical proximity with residential structures, this exposes residents to substantive risk of injury and death due to aircraft crashing.

A 3rd party risk model that maps risk of injury, death and percent structural damage will enable informed decisions ...

Applying Probabilistic Methods To The Nato Military Load Classification System For Bridges, Andrew J. Macdonald

University of Western Ontario - Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Military vehicles frequently use civilian bridges. The loading effects of military vehicles, both wheeled and tracked, are specific and different than those of civilian vehicles in normal traffic. Calibration to determine appropriate load factors for military loading of civilian bridges has not been fully performed and the corresponding levels of safety have not been quantified. This lack of calibration prevents the implementation of limit state design methods for military bridges and the evaluation bridges for military loading. This thesis quantifies probabilistically the single lane traffic load effects on interior girders of simply supported slab-on-girder bridges for three military vehicles in ...

Plutonium Worlds. Fast Breeders, Systems Analysis And Computer Simulation In The Age Of Hypotheticality, Sebastian Vehlken

communication +1

This article examines the media history of one of the hallmark civil nuclear energy programs in Western Germany – the development of Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor (LMFBR) technology. Promoted as a kind of perpetuum mobile of the Atomic Age, the "German Manhattan Project" not only imported big science thinking. In its context, nuclear technology was also put forth as an avantgarde of scientific inquiry, dealing with the most complex and 'critical' technological endeavors. In the face of the risks of nuclear technology, German physicist Wolf Häfele thus announced a novel epistemology of "hypotheticality". In a context where traditional experimental engineering ...

Mechanical & Materials Engineering Faculty Publications

This work is to develop an experiment-validated numerical model to elucidate the wave transmission mechanisms through a surrogate head under blast loading. Repeated shock tube tests were conducted on a surrogate head, i.e., water-filled polycarbonate shell. Surface strain on the skull simulant and pressure inside the brain simulant were recorded at multiple locations. A numerical model was developed to capture the shock wave propagation within the shock tube and the fluid-structure interaction between the shock wave and the surrogate head. The obtained numerical results were compared with the experimental measurements. The experiment-validated numerical model was then used to further ...

Cooperative Construction In Schools In California, John Mauck Donley

Master's Theses and Project Reports

Cooperative Construction in Schools in California

John M. Donley

The construction industry has lost efficiency since 1964, while becoming increasingly more litigious. Schools in California can ill afford the time to allow the construction industry time to fully evolve. It may take years or decades to fully improve the efficiency of, and reduce the conflict within the construction industry.

At the same time, the construction industry has developed new processes to improve efficiency and reduce conflict. These processes are beginning to be broadly embraced by the industry. They all contain cooperative elements. Taken together they represent a new organizing principle ...

Risk A Lot Or Risk Averse? Studies From The Southbank Ppp, Norman Jagger

Public Infrastructure Bulletin

In the late 1990s the Queensland Government announced its first Public Private Partnership (PPP) contract. No Queensland public sector agency had PPP experience and the search for a suitable project that would test the new Queensland PPP policy evoked disparate expectations within government and within the private sector. The subsequent debate was long, arduous and highly charged on issues of ideology, government business and risk.

The Government accepted the business case for the redevelopment of the Southbank Education and Training Precinct (SETP) and nominated Southbank Institute of TAFE (SBIT) as the public sector agency to lead the procurement of the ...

Traffic Risk In The Australian Toll Road Sector, John Black

Public Infrastructure Bulletin

The article seeks to provide an answer to question about the role of the state in infrastructure planning and delivery and why have Australian state governments been keen to embrace the PPP model of procurement for roads, bridges and tunnels. A contemporary issue is the accuracy of the traffic forecasts on toll roads procured by governments with the PPP model. The “traffic forecasters” in Australia are identified and the broad order of magnitude are the accuracies of their forecasts on projected traffic for toll facilities compared with the actual opening traffic are analysed. Performance is poor (on average, traffic is ...

The Study Of Safety Governance For Service Robots: On Open-Texture Risk, Yueh-Hsuan Weng

Yueh-Hsuan Weng

The emergence of steam and microelectrical machines in society gradually expanded since the era of the Industrial Revolution. Up until now, human beings have already co-existed with these machines for more than two centuries, and contemporary laws have developed preventional regulatory frameworks. These frameworks are based on risk assessments to supervise the safety of microelectrical machines which include automobiles, railway systems, elevators and industrial robots, etc. Regulators, especially South Korea and Japan expect human-robot co-existence societies to emerge within the next decade. These next generation robots will be capable of adapting to complex, unstructured environments and interact with humans to ...

Master's Theses and Project Reports

The CubeSat community has begun to develop and implement propulsion systems. This movement represents a new capability which may satisfy mission needs such as orbital and constellation maintenance, formation flight, de-orbit, and even interplanetary travel. With the freedom and capability granted by propulsion systems, CubeSat providers must accept new responsibilities in proportion to the potential hazards that propulsion systems may present.

The Cal Poly CubeSat program publishes and maintains the CubeSat Design Specification (CDS). They wish to help the CubeSat community to safety and responsibly expand its capabilities to include propulsive designs. For this reason, the author embarked on the ...

Current Research Project Narratives

Events such as terrorist attacks and technological accidents can have a range of possible consequences. Potential events with extremely catastrophic consequences merit at least some risk analyses of greater scope, including longer time horizons, than for less-consequential events. Some rapidly developing technologies, such as in synthetic biology or critical infrastructure control systems, pose much greater risks of catastrophe in the future than they do today. These risks could be significantly reduced with enough foresight and advance warning. However, risk assessments that focus on what is possible in the relatively near term may overlook indicators of developments that would enable more-catastrophic ...

Current Research Project Narratives

Year 10 will be the beginning of a new research effort by the PI, which was motivated by his involvement in a National Academy study on evaluating the effectiveness of the Global Nuclear Detection Architecture (GNDA), a major effort of the Domestic Nuclear Detection Organization (DNDO). The GNDA employs a geographically layered defense strategy to prevent the theft and transportation of radiological and nuclear materials from a foreign source to a target in the US. The GNDA concept of a layered defense is similar to the concept of “defense in depth” promoted by the Nuclear Regulatory Agency for nuclear power ...

Using Risk Analysis To Assess The Value Of Improved Biosurveillance, Henry H. Willis

Current Research Project Narratives

The Department of Homeland Security, Office of Health Affairs (DHS-OHA) manages the National Biosurveillance Integration Center (NBIC) to enable early warning and shared situational awareness of bioterrorism and pandemic disease events. NBIC’s goal is to improve public response to these incidents by disseminating warning and recommended actions to the appropriate interagency partners in a timely fashion. Strategic Goal 2 of the NBIC Strategic Plan (DHS 2012) establishes a directive for DHS to:

Enhance federal government ability to rapidly identify, characterize, localize, and track a biological event of national concern by integrating and analyzing information relating to human health, animal ...

Current Research Project Narratives

For too long, government agencies presumed that a single warning shared through standard media channels was sufficient for reaching all stakeholders during a crisis. This linear view fails to account for the diverse informational needs and cultural constraints within the broad audiences that are confronted by crises (Sellnow, Ulmer, Seeger, & Littlefield). As a means of addressing variance of audience needs, more recent scholarship has bridged instructional research with risk communication. The objective of this blended approach is to enhance an organization or agency’s capacity to generate messages that attend to the varying learning styles inherent in their audiences. Moreover, this line of research seeks to account for varying cultural preferences in crisis messages. Through ongoing message testing procedures, current research seeks to engage diverse audiences in a dialogue of message preferences prior to a crisis situation. One promising line of such instructional or informative communication focuses on inoculating or two-sided persuasion messages. These messages, delivered before a crisis and at the onset of a crisis recovery period, have the potential for diminishing loss of confidence in government agencies or in expediting the recovery of confidence for these agencies.

This project provides a framework for establishing communication strategies that, when implemented routinely prior to a crisis can reduce recovery time and enhance public resilience. Current research provides a detailed summary of effective crisis communication. Existing research, however has only recently begun to evaluate the effectiveness of communication strategies used prior to an acute crisis event. This project focuses on two highly relevant communication aspects in maintaining or rebuilding public confidence—accepting uncertainty and self-protection (Seeger, 2006; Sellnow, Ulmer, Seeger, & Littlefield, 2009). We selected these two aspects because of their salience in current literature and because of our presumption that they have relevance to post-crisis recovery. This project will build on previous research that has (a) successfully identified the importance of instructional messages in raising the perceived ...

Modeling The Dynamics Of Risk Perception And Fear: Examining Amplifying Mechanisms And Their Consequences, William J. Burns

Current Research Project Narratives

The purpose of this research is to improve our understanding of how perceived risk and negative emotions (e.g., fear, anger, sadness) might spread throughout a community and ripple to other parts of the nation following events differing in their risk signal. It specifically seeks to understand the public’s comparative response to a wide array of hazards. It also seeks to examine how the effects of risk communication messaging spread throughout a population offering protection from counterproductive attitudes and behaviors. This work significantly extends the system dynamics modeling done by Burns and Slovic, decision modeling by Rosoff et al ...

Current Research Project Narratives

The purpose of this research is to develop an elicitation process to effectively assess important quantities, such as adversary intent and capabilities, target vulnerabilities, and countermeasure costs, by aggregating probabilistic judgments given by multiple experts. In particular, in the proposed method, a panel of subject-matter experts with differing backgrounds and interests would be asked to give estimates for the uncertain quantities of interest, as well as a set of “seed variables” whose values are verifiable using historical or anticipated near-future data. To adequately reflect the experts’ levels of confidence or uncertainty about each quantity of interest, they would be asked ...

Individuals’ Responses To Near-Miss Events Over Time, Robin Dillon-Merrill

Current Research Project Narratives

This research team has been studying near-miss events and individuals’ reactions to near-miss events for several years as part of the CREATE effort. We have also been closely collaborating for several years with CREATE researchers: William Burns, Richard John, and Heather Rosoff. While this is a proposal submitted by Georgetown University, the work will be collaborative with our USC-CREATE colleagues, and we will be focused on developing insights and recommendations that can support the economic modeling efforts of CREATE. After most catastrophes, prior near-misses are identified. Near-misses occur when a negative event could have happened (for example, because of hazardous ...

Current Research Project Narratives

The threat of terrorism is of great concern in many countries and significant resources are being spent to deter terrorism and to mitigate the impacts of terrorist attacks. A better understanding of terrorist organizations and their evolving motivations and values over time is a critical component to decisions about allocating resources to minimize the impact of these organizations.

During past years, we have focused on developing and validating our pioneering approach to adversary preference modeling (APM) through the construction of random utility models of terrorist preferences. For year 10, we propose developing and testing a tool that serves as a ...